Homeless in Connecticut

I'm liking Connecticut's junior Senator more and more all the time. This guy gets it. In order to better understand the reality his poorest constituents face, Sen. Chris Murphy spent the day with a homeless guy. The guy did everything right. He overcame tremendous odds in his childhood to better his life. Then the crash came and he lost his job and his home. Now he's on the street and the paltry $400 a month he was receiving in UI benefits were cut off by the crackpot conservatives in Congress.

Thing is, this "fiscally responsible" policy makes it almost impossible for the homeless guy to get back to a decent life. He's trying to find a job but:

If there’s one thing Murphy took away from the experience, it’s a better sense of how critical stable housing is as a foundation for solving other problems. “Without a place to live, Nick can’t find a job,” Murphy said. “Without a house, it’s much harder for him to kick his drug habit.” But without more affordable housing in Connecticut and funding for the poor, it’s extremely difficult for people like Nick to leave the shelter and break out of the cycle of poverty.

Every damn politician that voted to cut assistance for the poor should be forced to spend a month in their shoes. Maybe that would cure their sociopathic callousness.

Humanitarian assistance

Don't have much hope for this one passing, but at least it will bring the slow motion disaster that is our long term unemployed back into the news. First bill Harry Reid will bring to the floor in the new session will be a three month extension of unemployment benefits which expired on Saturday after the Boehner's Heartless House of Dysfunction skulked out town for their holiday joy without addressing the crisis.

The Senate is expected to take up a bill sponsored by Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), which would temporarily extend the benefits without offsetting the cost.

“I hope we can get that done,” Reid said.

This on top of the cuts to food assistance for the poor, which are about to be cut again if the Crackpot Caucus succeeds in their latest round of policy by extortion. There are millions of Americans who will be starting out the new year, scared, hungry and cold because our coddled, self-absorbed, overpaid political class are more concerned about their own cushy sinecures than representing the interests of the commonwealth.

Charlie is right. These people must be stopped before it's too late. It will only happen if we fight together to take back our government.

RIP: I remember the middle class

Once the people worked hard and prospered. Those days are gone. The middle class is disappearing like free snacks at happy hour now. So for your Sunday reading, a good review of how we got to our current dismal state of "everything is all fucked up and bullshit."

When I was growing up, it was assumed that America’s shared prosperity was the natural endpoint of our economy’s development, that capitalism had produced the workers paradise to which Communism unsuccessfully aspired. Now, with the perspective of 40 years, it’s obvious that the nonstop economic expansion that lasted from the end of World War II to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was a historical fluke, made possible by the fact that the United States was the only country to emerge from that war with its industrial capacity intact. Unfortunately, the middle class – especially the blue-collar middle class – is also starting to look like a fluke, an interlude between Gilded Ages that more closely reflects the way most societies structure themselves economically. For the majority of human history – and in the majority of countries today – there have been only two classes: aristocracy and peasantry. It’s an order in which the many toil for subsistence wages to provide luxuries for the few. Twentieth century America temporarily escaped this stratification, but now, as statistics on economic inequality demonstrate, we’re slipping back in that direction. Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent. Last year, the wealthiest 1 percent took in 19 percent of America’s income – their highest share since 1928. It’s as though the New Deal and the modern labor movement never happened. [...]

The United States will never again be as wealthy as it was in the 1950s and ’60s. Never again will 18-year-olds graduate directly from high school to jobs that pay well enough to buy a house and support a family. (Even the auto plants now demand a few years in junior college.) That was inevitable, due to the recovery of our World War II enemies, and automation that enables 5,000 workers to build the same number of cars that once required 25,000 hands. What was not inevitable was the federal government withdrawing its supervision of the economy at the precise moment Americans began to need it more than at any time since the Great Depression.

The lesson of the last 40 years is that we can’t depend on the free market to sustain a middle class. It’s not going to happen without government intervention. Even when American industry dominated the world, one reason workers prospered was that the economy operated on New Deal underpinnings, which included legal protections for labor unions, government regulation of industry and high marginal income tax rates.

Related: The Complete Guide To The GOP’s Three-Year Campaign To Shut Down The Government. Alternate title, "The GOP invents its own reality." If it was a work of fiction no publisher would publish it because the storyline is so absurd.

DC to Walmart: Screw you

Nice to see some good news from a local government for a change. Walmart threatened to cancel their ambitious building projects in DC if the local council didn't kill legislation they disapproved of but the DC Council passed a living wage law anyway.

D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city.

Should the bill be signed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and pass a congressional review period, retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger would be required to pay employees no less than $12.50 an hour. The city’s minimum wage is $8.25, a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage.

Good for DC for recognizing wages need to be pinned to the actual cost of living. Every city should pass a law that requires these mega-retailers to pay their employees enough so they don't need government assistance to survive. And certainly well past time for someone to stand up to Walmart's intimidation tactics. Let them take their greedy business model of wringing out their profits by shifting the social costs of underpaying their workers onto the taxpayers and shove it.

Predatory capitalists

There's no real news this weekend so here's your long read. ProPublica posts an eye-opening piece, "The Expendables: How the temps who power corporate giants are getting crushed."

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Corporations have been using temps to cut costs for decades, but under the latest iteration of this business model, the plan appears to be to virtually cut full time hires to the barest minimum in order to exploit a desperate job market and effectively shift the social costs of their predatory capitalism onto the taxpayer.

Read it in full to see our future. They're stealthily turning us into a banana republic. Hard to see how this ends well for anyone except the owners and their CEOs.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Round-up.]

For whom the economy recovers

This isn't new, but it shows income inequality keeps getting progressively worse every day.

In short, our current obsessed-with-profits philosophy is creating a country of a few million overlords (shareholders) and 300+ million serfs (employees).

It is also resulting in employees sharing less of the corporate wealth that they spend their lives creating than they ever have before.

That's not what has made America a great country. It's also not what most people think America or other lands of opportunity are supposed to be about.

This is an old chart I've had saved for a few months. Read the link for the wonkery and more charts that show how quickly the gap has grown. Yet they call the workers, "the takers." Clearly they have it backwards.

The unseen victims of austerity addicts

According to the very important punditry, the sequestration spending cuts are just a big joke because -- ha ha -- the world didn't end and nothing happened to the well off Villagers, so what's the big deal? Of course they don't mention the cuts haven't really taken full effect yet. They're only just now beginning to filter out around our country. Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel collected 100 instances where the spending cuts have started. Already social safety programs like Meals on Wheels are being cut, thousands of jobs are being lost, and those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs are seeing pay cuts of 20% and more. None of these people are laughing.

John Stanton tells one combat veteran's story. The man served honorably in our government's wars. He came home and worked hard to climb the economic ladder. This is his reward.

Then sequestration slashed Maryak's paycheck by nearly 27%. That cut nearly $900 from the $3,400 he makes a pay period. He responded, first, by picking up a job four nights a week delivering pizza for Papa John's; he then traded in the BMW for a white Chevy Impala, to save money and because he discovered that nobody tips the delivery man in the BMW. And since that miserable combination hasn't quite closed the gap — gas is expensive, and the Impala gets terrible mileage — Maryak, who was awarded a bronze star in Sadr City in 2008, found himself dwelling deeply on one question: "How do I unfuck myself from this situation?"

His best answer is to go back to active combat duty, but that's not an easy option:

But Maryak, who's applied for eight deployments so far, has run into another problem: With the United States out of Iraq, withdrawing from Afghanistan, and wary of putting boots on the ground in Africa and the Middle East, "deployments are ridiculously hard to find nowadays."

Admit it pleases the anti-war part of me that this is true, but it doesn't help Maryak solve his cash flow problems. He takes responsibility for his choices. He's worked hard all his life. His story is being repeated thousands of times all across America. They deserve better than to be used as a pawns in the partisan political games on Capitol Hill.

Will you still need me, when I'm 54

This piece was written by a woman of relative privilege. She's not worried about where her next meal is coming from, or how to keep a roof over her head. But these grafs could apply to anyone who lost good paying jobs after the crash of 08. Thing is, with unemployment still too high and advancing technology allowing big employers to wring greater productivity out of fewer workers, "leaning in" is a cruel joke on 50something women:

Leaning in isn’t really an option for women like Marie and me, because frankly, it’s not even that easy to get someone to take our calls. In a world where newly minted JDs can’t get jobs, and college graduates are willing to take extended unpaid internships, very few employers have an interest in a 50-something-year-old woman who has been out of the workforce for 15 years and would now like a paying job. Hiring managers, facing a wave of thousands of well-qualified candidates, are going to toss out ones that try to substitute PTA executive board skills for work experience (and that’s assuming the resume even makes it through the computer algorithms that select a handful to be perused by a real person). Reading Sandberg’s prescriptions — get a mentor, don’t ever exclude options, lose your shyness and be assertive, negotiate like a man, marry a man willing to change diapers — I feel like I’m listening to a well-meaning yet clueless relative.

Women over 55 are generally ignored if they don’t have good jobs, lots of money, social standing, or powerful husbands. While this so-called “invisibility” problem has been well documented (just google “invisibility older women” and you’ll find a host of articles and blogs), today’s world seems fixated on youth, good looks and viral fame. Older women generally don’t elicit a second glance – we seem to have a sell by date and after that we’re pretty disposable – and to me, that lack of interest coupled with a resume that might have some blank spots, spells trouble if you’re trying to lean in.

The author of that piece will be okay no matter what happens, but for millons of women of lesser social standing, the desperate trade-off is between abject poverty and part time, minimum wage jobs in the service industry. Their economic security will never recover and even the employment they can find won't pay all the bills.

And it's not just women of a certain age who suffer in the age of austerity madness. Young people are finding it impossible to make ends meet as well:

“I never thought that I would be struggling as much as I have this year,” said Horton, whose already-stretched income dropped abruptly when her hours were cut at the disability services agency where she works.

The article doesn't say, but one can assume that agency almost surely depends on government grants to operate. The current mania to slash spending, mainly perpetrated by Beltway overlords who themselves enjoy income security, leads to this sort of downsizing. Which in turn leads to further economic contraction, which will lead to more downsizing in the private sector.

I've been mocked for saying this before, but I don't care. It's difficult to see this as anything less than slow motion genocide of the poors and the olds. These people are struggling to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families. Health care doesn't even enter the picture. The lack of proper nutrition, preventative health care and adding in the stress of living with permanent insecurity can only lead to many early deaths. So what else can you call it? [photo via]

Corporate boom spells workers' doom

Yet another article on how mega-corporations are eating our economy right out from under us. Corporate share of the national income gains are at a decade's long high, while the workers' share is at a decades' long low. The split hasn't been this pronounced in 50 years. And nothing is going to change until our overlords decide to do something about persistent under and un-employment. Unfortunately for the working class, they have no incentive to do so.

The sequester is going to make it even worse but Wall Street isn't worried.

But although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits — or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock markets.

“It’s minimal,” said Savita Subramanian, head of United States equity and quantitative strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Over all, the sequester could reduce earnings at the biggest companies by just over 1 percent, she said, adding, “the market wants more austerity.”

Of course it does. An insecure workforce doesn't agitate for higher wages and better benefits. Good for the profit margin. That's not likely to change anytime soon because Big Corporate is firing people, not hiring them.

“Right now, C.E.O.’s are saying, ‘I don’t really need to hire because of the productivity gains of the last few years,’ ” said Robert E. Moritz, chairman of the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Productivity gains being the code word for increasing the workload while slashing personnel. Workers are left with little choice in a high unemployment environment. They'll work harder for less because they're living paycheck to paycheck and need the job. Also, somewhat more affordable health care plans.

Derek Thompson has the charts to illustrate this sadistically skewed distribution of wealth. It's even more infuriating when you view it historically over the decades.

Addendum: It's even uglier when Dave Johnson recaps the trajectory in headlines only.

The 100 million protest march

Chances are you didn't see this story on your TV news stations. I only saw it because I caught an odd RT in my twitter stream. My google-fu tells me it was barely covered by the high profile US news orgs even in print/online. But Al Jazeera was there:



If you can't watch the video, the workers of India have had enough of being exploited by the owners and the politicians.

As many as 100 million Indians angry about high prices, low pay and poor working conditions walked off their jobs Wednesday as a two-day strike organized by 11 major trade unions closed banks, disrupted major transportation and reportedly saw two deaths, Al-Jazeera reports.

The strikers want a legal minimum wage, fairer contracts, better working conditions and a halt to outsourcing of public jobs to the private sector.

Doesn't sound so different from the current state of our country.

Worker solidarity will get any government's attention. Wondering how bad it will have to get here before the exploited workers of America take to the streets.

Can't live without a living wage

Happy to see Nancy Pelosi throw down a challenge to the GOP on an issue that really matters to the little people. She told the media Democrats would be pushing a minimum wage raise and if GOPers didn't get on board they could explain it to the voters in 2014.

The strategy is straightforward:

“Just keep it simple. We want to raise the minimum wage, and you don’t. Why not?”

She understands the politics perfectly:

“There’s an even greater awareness now than there was six years ago about the disparity of income in our country — and that this disparity is not a healthy thing for a family or an economy,” Pelosi told me. “Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, but it’s a popular thing to do as well.”

This was something Republicans once understood as well. When George W. Bush was president, 67 GOPers (still in office today) supported minimum wage hikes. The hike passed with a large bi-partisan majority vote because Democrats didn't put their personal partisan interests over the common good of the working class people.

Not so for Republicans. GOP House leader John Boehner rejected the idea almost before President Obama finished proposing it. Boehner wails it can't be done because, job killer. A claim that is not supported by empirical evidence but yet goes unchalleged by the DC media elites, who merely transcribe the nonsense without comment or context.

In truth, what actual non-partisan research shows is that an artifically low minimum wage effectively subsidizes highly profitable corporate employers. They rake in record breaking profits while the taxpayer foots the bill for social services the employees need. Social welfare the working poor qualify for because their inadequate wages do not cover the barest basic cost of living.

The hell of it is, the paltry $9 an hour still isn't enough in today's economy. If we look at the history of the minimum wage, we find, "it had its highest buying power in 1968 at $1.60, when it was worth about $10.56." If memory serves a gallon of gas was well under 50 cents in those days.

This isn't about protecting jobs. It's about Republicans protecting the wealthy. It comes down to unmitigated greed. Sadly, we don't have Ted Kennedy to make the case anymore.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

This was tweeted into my stream this afternoon:

One tough nerd: "I have signed the freedom to work bills into law." - Gov Rick Snyder

And by freedom he means, the freedom to be worked to death for little pay, few insufficient benefits and absolutely no job security in the name of obscene corporate profits. And of course, the legislation is straight out of the Koch-funded ALEC playbook. Practically verbatim.

So yes, as Teamster's president Jimmy Hoffa said on CNN, "This is just the first round of a battle that's going to divide this state. We're going to have a civil war."

As they should. This ransacking of workers rights needs to be contested. And when organized labor fights back in Michigan, never forget, the Republicans fired the first shot.

Super-size this strike

First there was the Black Friday Walmart Walkout. Today brings a fast food workers strike:

Today in New York City, though, hundreds of workers at dozens of fast-food chain stores are walking out on strike, demanding better of those jobs. At McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, KFC, Taco Bell, and Domino's Pizza locations, workers have been organizing, and today they launch their campaign. They want a raise, to $15-an-hour from their current near-minimum wage pay, and recognition for their independent union, the Fast Food Workers Committee.

In all these corporate worker actions, the media inevitably passes on these sort of statistics. I always wonder how they get to these numbers. Think they must average in the CEO compensation or something.

The median hourly wage for food service and prep workers is a mere $8.90 an hour in New York City, according to the New York Department of Labor. But Jasska Harris still makes the federal minimum wage -- $7.25 -- after five months on the job, and struggles to get even 35 hours a week. And that minimum wage buys less than it used to. A recent study from the National Employment Law Project pointed out that the value of the minimum wage is 30 percent lower than it was in 1968.

I've worked in a big box store. I know many people who still do and Jasska Harris is the norm. Particularly in "right to work" states these places pay the absolute legal minimum. Very few workers get full time hours. Where I worked, a 24 hour schedule for any week was rare even for long term employees. More common was 14 to 18 hours and that was doled out in four hour shifts. If a worker manages to endure the abuse long enough to merit a raise, their hours get cut in favor of a new employee making less. And if they get to a point where they actually qualify for benefits, chances are high they'll be laid off. Meanwhile, millions and billions of profits go to the owners and the corporate execs with a bit dribbled down to shareholders.

Nobody paid much attention when it was mostly kids taking these jobs, but now that we're turning into a "service" economy there are simply too many people trying to survive under these impossible conditions. It's a hideous, inhumane, unsustainable business model.

Check out the workers new twitter account fastfoodforward for photos. Workers unite. It's the only way to beat the plutocrats.

Building a better Black Friday

I've never ventured into the fray on a Black Friday but my inner sociologist is compelled to watch, in fascinated horror, as the annual fail of civil society unfolds in news reports. This seems to have been a better year than any in recent history. As far as I've seen, no one got trampled and no one died at the hands of deranged shoppers.

Which is not to say there weren't some inevitable incidents of Black Friday rage. Actually found the fact that a guy in Texas wasn't charged with a crime for pulling a gun on a line jumper because it wasn't against the law more disturbing than the fact the guy pulled a gun in a massive crowd of innocent bystanders to protect his right to save $50 on a fking flat screen teevee. But he didn't shoot it, so there's that.

More hopeful for the future of humanity was what turned out to be a successful Walmart protest. Despite corporate's attempts to minimize it, there were a thousand small but vigorous protests all over America. I saw a lot of local coverage in a random check this morning. Sure they didn't hurt Walmart's bottom line and few employees could afford to walk off the job. But the activists won the battle.

Their message got out. Big box retailers, as exemplified by Walmart, exploit their workers and foist their costs onto the taxpayers in order to increase their profits. This model of "job creation" isn't an avenue to an equitable society. It's a parasitic drain on our national economy.

People were talking about it. It reached widely into the social nets. Hoping the activists find more ways to keep this conversation going.Would be useful to discuss it at further length.

Obligatory Black Friday post

Walmart is always the focus of our Black Friday voyeurism though all the big box stores are just as guilty of exploiting their workers and ruining the formerly thriving Main Streets of our youth. But in the end, none of us escape the blame. The business model exists only because we support the big box/Walmart stores by shopping there.

There's a new twist to Black Friday this year because Walmart workers and workers rights activists are pushing back with a strike of sorts and various protests across the nation. Not sure it's going to have much effect. The organizers claim there's 1000 protests across 46 states but none look bigger than the crowds of shoppers to me.

The Chicago event looks the biggest that I've seen. But the photos are rolling in from Miami, Dearborn MI and various other locations. My personal favorite is this one in Kenosha:

[photo via]

Still the number of strikers/protesters can't compete with the bargain hunters, who are willing to do serious battle for an iPhone. It's frightening to realize they look more menacing than actual riots. I took this BuzzFeed quiz and only got 10 out of 15 right.

It's unlikely today's protests will hurt the corporation financially. It certainly won't hurt the Walmart heirs who together hold as much wealth as the collective wealth of 41% of lower income Americans. But to the extent that it generates some mainstream media attention on Walmart's business practices, it's a start. The majority of their employees work as many hours as they can get, yet they can't exist without food stamp and Medicaid assistance. Walmart stores don't build unless they get huge tax breaks and other government subsidies. If the protests raise even a little awareness on how we're all paying for their cheap pricing whether or not we shop there, it will be worth it.

Invisible people

This is only one is series of videos the labor union AFSCME is releasing on the theme of the 47% that Rmoney doesn't care about. I like it. It's low key, but effective I think. Also, too, most people don't appreciate how hard their garbage collectors work. Difficult to think of a more vital, yet thankless job.



[via]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Taking it to the streets

I was watching BBC News last night and remembering when our media used to cover foreign events. Time was when massive demonstrations in Spain would have made the U.S. nightly news. The official count in Madrid was 100,000 protestors.

The organizers claimed that 800,000 people participated, and El Pais noted that the cuts program ‘ has unified a range of unions, organizations and social movements whose cooperation would have been unimaginable up to a week ago — six major labor unions working together for the first time is a telling sign.’

Indeed it is. And similar protests have been taking place all over Spain. Last Wednesday, thousands of demonstrators in Valencia, Alicante and Castellón took to the streets in a joint protest organized by Spain’s two major unions under the slogan ‘Quieren arruinar el país: hay que impedirlo’ -’ they want to ruin the country, we have to stop them.’

In Valencia demonstrators surrounded the office of the mayor chanting ‘¡corruptos!’ and ‘¡Hasta los huevos,estamos hasta los huevos!‘ – ‘Up to here, we’ve had it up to here!’ and ‘con este gobierno vamos de culo’ – ‘ with this government, we’re screwed.’ [...]

Others placards denounced the government’s austerity measures as ‘financial terrorism’, while demonstrators chanted ‘Rajoy, escucha, el pueblo esta en la lucha’ – ‘Listen Rajoy, the people are in struggle’ (it sounds better in Spanish) and ‘se va a acabar la paz social‘ – ‘the social peace is over.’

It reminds me of the now nearly ancient article in The Atlantic, The Quiet Coup: "But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and ... look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large."

What worries me is the riots keep growing larger but it doesn't seem to be slowing down the oligarchs at all. If anything they keep doubling down, madly extracting every penny possible from the world economies before the torches and pitchforks arrive at their gates. [More photos here]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Same as it ever was

Our corporate overlords lament has been the same for a hundred years.

[original graphic] [Complimentary soundtrack]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Words matter

Facebook find of the day. Proper framing is everything.



Adding: How to talk about voter suppression.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

In search of a living wage

Of course, this doesn't have a prayer of passing, but paying people more at the bottom of the economic ladder would be a great form of stimulus:

A group of House Democrats have proposed increasing the minimum wage to $10, which, as Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) pointed out would allow the wage to “catch up” with where it would be had it been allowed to grow with inflation. [...]

The minimum wage hit its peak buying power in 1968; to have the same buying power today, the minimum wage would have to be $9.92. If the minimum wage had been indexed to the Consumer Price Index since 1968, it would be approximately $10.40 today.

Cue the anguished wails from Capitol Hill, where they get automatic COLA increases to their six figure salaries every freaking year, about how this would be a horrible, job killing burden on small business owners. Wish there was some way to make these guys live on that hourly rate themselves. Frankly, it's about what their "work" product is worth.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]